Can't figure out proper shim for UniquePtr instead of returning global singleton

[n8henrie]

Hello,

I've long been interested in seeing of CXX could help in making rust bindings to TaskWarrior, though it looks like @djmitche is incorporating rust into the project in a different route (which is exciting to see) -- so this is mostly an experiment for my learning at this point.

I don't know C or C++, so I'm starting from a fairly disadvantaged perspective.

Using bindgen alone, I was able to get taskwarrior's Context::dispatch to work from Rust, so I wanted to convert my work (just a few lines of code) to CXX to compare.

TaskWarrior source

• Context.h
• Context.cpp

taskwarrior-sys (bindgen)

• https://github.com/n8henrie/taskwarrior-rs/tree/master/taskwarrior-sys
• See wrapper.{cpp,h} and src/lib.rs

Hopefully my terminology is correct, but it seems that Taskwarrior uses this approach:

• declares a uninitialized global Context (a singleton?)
• Context::setContext (&globalContext);, which sets Context::context to the global context
• Calls Context::getContext for all subsequent calls
• Initializes the context
• Calls Context::run, which delegates to Context::dispatch

To translate this to cxx, it looks like there may be a couple of challenges, for example regarding constructors:

• It seems like the rust signature would be Context::new() -> Self, but cxx seems to require some kind of self: &Context argument to define something as a method
  • Distinguish static member function on shared structs #447
  • This also made it difficult for me to determine the signatures for the static methods such as setContext and getContext
• Some of the issues with constructors are reviewed in Provide builtin handling of exposing a C++ constructor #280
• In that issue, use of a shim to return a UniquePtr seems to be recommended

Here is my attempt, with several lines commented out from previous attempts:

taskwarrior-sys (cxx)

• https://github.com/n8henrie/taskwarrior-rs/blob/cxx/taskwarrior-sys/src/lib.rs
• https://github.com/n8henrie/taskwarrior-rs/blob/cxx/taskwarrior-sys/shims.h

The loop I would run into was, for example:

// static Context& Context::getContext ()
fn getContext() -> &Context;

Result: error: no member named 'getContext' in the global namespace

Doesn't work because this tries to define getContext as a free function and doesn't find the Context::getContext method. To fix that I need a self: parameter as noted in the issue above.

fn getContext(self: &Context) -> &Context;

result:

error: cannot initialize a variable of type 'const ::Context &(Context::*)() const' with an rvalue of type 'Context &(*)()': different return type ('const ::Context &' (aka 'const Context &') vs 'Context &')

Makes sense, I think this means that returning &Context returns a const value instead of a mutable one

• Can't return &mut Context, must be Pin<&mut Context>
• Can't return a Pin<&mut ...> without a Pin<&mut ...> input

fn getContext(self: Pin<&mut Context>) -> Pin<&mut Context>;

result:

error: cannot initialize a variable of type '::Context &(Context::*)()' with an rvalue of type 'Context &(*)()'

Unfortunately I don't really understand this, so then I tried creating a shim and creating / returning UniquePtr<Context>.

Am I on the right track just trying to create a shim that wraps everything in std::unique_ptr like so?

inline void Context_setContext(std::unique_ptr<Context> context) {
  Context::setContext(context);
}

Sorry that this is more of a "I don't know c++" problem than a rust problem; if there's a more appropriate place to ask, please let me know!

Thank you for your time and for providing this library!